Dido Königin von Carthago by Christoph Graupner (Hamburg, Opera am Gänsemarkt 1707) with a libretto by Hinrich Hinsch is yet another version of a myth that many composers and poets have explored: the fall of a widowed queen who, despite having founded Carthage completely by herself, rather goes down in history for dying of heartbreak and wounded pride after the demi-god AEneas abandons her, bound by destiny to settle on Italian ground. In this version of the myth, Dido is survived and succeeded by her sister Anna, whose enthronement and marriage to Juba provide a happy ending and a reassuring development perspective that supposedly, somehow sweetens Dido’s bitter end. In his book Abandoned Women and Poetic Traditions (1988, University of Chicago Press), Lawrence Lipking describes the vertiginous depth of our main character: ‘The abandoned woman remains elusive and restless. She can be both pitiably weak and terrifyingly strong, both all-too-human and quasi-divine.’ Dido feels and generates contrasting and uncontainable emotional flows in others. Emotions more than actions are in fact the subject matter of this story; requited and unrequited love, remorse, extreme fear, blind passion, self-sacrifice and thirst for power, selfishness and selflessness form a multi-faceted prism, in which the mesh of their individual adventures leads every character to confront itself directly with Dido and her charisma. Our title-role protagonist is the reference point towards which all perspective lines are orientated, the centre of the elusive universe that revolves around her, to the point that after her suicide this universe dissolves and the joy of Carthage celebrating the beginning of Anna’s reign seems superficial and lacking a true centre of gravity: Dido cannot be replaced. The libretto of Dido Königin von Carthago is organised into multiple coordinated, alternating subplots. We are thus taken successively inside and outside the palace, through galleries, private rooms, antichambers, courtyards, crypts and seashores, the harbour, the woods, altars and burning fires. Impassible, cold-hearted, and cruel gods appear unexpectedly to punctuate the life of warm-blooded, passion-filled human characters and setting insurmountable borders to their apparent freedom. I believe this vertigo of feelings and places to be the structural, precious, founding aspect of this early-eighteenth century opera that deserves to be observed and preserved in a staging of this piece that, even though not attempting to be a reconstruction of an original performance, presents itself as historically informed in methods, structure, acting style and use of the machinery. I have asked the set-and costume designer Domenico Franchi to portray Dido herself in the set, building a baroque stage machine representing the multiple facets of her character, the different textures of the feelings animating her and the extreme flexibility of her swirling emotions. Her vertiginous fall becomes palpable in the quick changes of the set and the fast pace of the plot development, up to the spectacular moment in which the whole machine vanishes after her death, leaving the empty space to a more traditional female figure – Anna – who reassuringly shares the throne of Carthage with her husband and brings the vertigo to an inevitable end.